In a conventional art, for example, a response of an IP address is obtained by a traceroute command defined in RFC 2151 from a layer-3 apparatus (which is one of network relay apparatuses and an apparatus to determine a destination of packets based on data in a network layer (i.e. third layer) of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) standard model and to transfer the packets to the destination. For example, a router, L3-switch or the like), and a communication route is detected base on the obtained data.
However, as depicted in FIG. 1, on the actual communication route (depicted by a thick line) from a terminal A at a location A to a server C at a location C, a switching hub, which is a layer-2 apparatus (which is one of network relay apparatuses, and an apparatus to determine a destination of packets by data in the data link layer (i.e. second layer) of the OSI standard model and transfer the packets to the destination), a carrier network apparatus (represented by square marks depicted in FIG. 1) and the like actually exist in addition to the layer-3 apparatus. However, they do not support a response function to the traceroute command. Namely, on the communication route depicted by the thick line, only the layer-3 apparatuses depicted as “L3” respond to the traceroute command. Therefore, it is impossible to accurately grasp the actual communication route, and this problem makes a long time required to detect the causes of the failures and to cope with capability problems.
Namely, the conventional art cannot collect a lot of information concerning apparatuses, which exist on the communication route.
In addition, the conventional art does not disclose any layer-2 apparatus that can reply predetermined setting data to a transmission source of a newly defined command in response to the command.
Furthermore, the conventional art does not disclose any carrier network apparatus that can reply the predetermined setting data to the transmission source of the newly defined command in response to the command.